


Camaraderie

by ShrimpZilla



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Male Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 09:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3244742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShrimpZilla/pseuds/ShrimpZilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen and Dorian are friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Camaraderie

**Author's Note:**

> written for the dragon age kink meme

He had watched his friends die in Kinloch Hold. Men and women tortured and tormented, killing each other, killing themselves. He had failed them. He had told himself that he needed to survive for them, but when it was all said and done and the silence and darkness edged in and their screams played on endless repeat through his dreams he realized that he had simply failed them. He should either have saved them or died with them. They had been his friends, his brothers and sisters who he had grown and trained with, lived with and served beside for years.   
  
He didn’t allow himself friends in Kirkwall. He had no time and his position kept him separate from the camaraderie of the common Templar. He had his Knight-Commander’s trust and that was more than enough for him. Or at least he had thought so. He had tried to stand with Meredith, tried to believe that this woman who had believed in him and built him up from the broken mess he had been when he arrived wasn’t what they whispered she was. But as the anger faded to bitter memories and the fear lived only in world shaking nightmares he had to replace his unwavering loyalty with unwanted clarity. It had been Hawke, Hawke who might have been a friend if he hadn’t been so desperately scared of the idea of more friends and more loss, who had caused the bile in the back of his throat whenever he saw Meredith, who had weakened his grip on his sword in the face of mages, who had fanned the near dead embers of protective tolerance that Uldred had blown out with his rebellion.   
  
Kirkwall was a blood bath. Templars killing Templars, mages killing mages, anyone killing anyone. He had stood in the center of it after Meredith was dead and Hawke had fled the city and tried to hold it together. He had rallied the Templars he could but his decision to take arms against the Knight-Commander had caused a shift, a break in the ranks that only caused more chaos. He wondered what had blinded him more: his dedication to the Templar Order and Meredith or his trust that the Champion was doing what was best for the city? Either way there was an inexcusable amount of blood on his hands. The blood of his brothers and the blood of those he had been sworn to protect. It stained him and marked him truly and unarguably a failure.   
  
He had spent much of the time after what happened in the Tower during the Blight praying. He did so even more during the time that followed the rebellion in Kirkwall. He prayed the Maker would show him a sign, show him what he was supposed to do. Everything he had been up until this point was wrong. He was certain of that now. He was never meant to be a Templar. He was never meant to protect. When Cassandra came and offered him the position with the Inquisition he took it without a second thought. The Templar Order had given him nothing but heartache and death and an empty hard place in his heart where friends and familiar faces had lived and died. And he swore, even as he swore to never use lyrium again, that he would not let the Inquisition down in the same way he had let down everyone else in his life. He would have no friends, no action-ceasing affections, no duty-clouding sense of hero worship or hope or trust. He would be hard. He would be cold. He would be a commander worthy of the people who stood below him.   
  
So he politely declined the offers to drinks, to dinners, to doing anything that wasn’t working himself to the brink of exhaustion for the cause. If he was working he could pretend the headaches were from lack of sleep that he chose, that the sore muscles were from training, that the nightmares… well, the nightmares were always just nightmares. But no matter what he would know that his decisions were not tainted with a familiarity that might ruin him or a fear of loss that might paralyze him or anything other than what needed to be done. 

 

“You’re cheating. You have to be cheating.” Cullen looked up from the report he had been studying as he walked towards his quarters.   
  
“Why? Is it because I’m from Tevinter and we’re all villains snickering behind our hands and twirling our mustaches as we toss helpless virgins into sacrificial pits? You wound me, Herald.” Dorian and the Herald were tucked away in a corner of the main hall in Haven’s Chantry. The quiet and the high ceilings vaulted their conversation easily to any listening ears. Cullen took a few more steps towards his destination which also brought him closer to the pair. He could see a chessboard set up between them. Dorian leaning back smugly in his seat while the Herald stared down at the pieces in utter disbelief, her brows tight and her teeth worrying her lip.  
  
“No, I’m convinced you’re cheating because I don’t remember the last time I lost a chess game.” She sighed. Cullen saw it more than heard it, the way her shoulders shifted and her lips parted. “I have to go talk to Cassandra anyway but… I’m watching you.” She pushed herself up out of her seat and Cullen realized that he had been standing and watching them like a fool. He straightened his shoulders when she spotted him, bowed his head slightly in greeting.  
  
“Herald,” he said simply. She smiled at him in the way that he wished she wouldn’t.   
  
“Maybe you can beat him. I can’t live with his gloating any longer. His ego’s likely to crush us all before the Breach ever does,” she joked lightly as she made her way through the same exit he had been working towards before his distraction. Dorian was turned in his seat and grinning at him.   
  
“What do you say, Commander? Fancy a game? I promise I’ll go easy on you if you ask nicely.” Cullen looked down at the report in his hand. It wasn’t imperative that he get this handled straight away. And he hadn’t played chess in years now. It was a strategy game which meant that if he really wanted to he could consider it a simple mind exercise rather than slacking off. He brought his gaze up to the mage and closed the distance between them to take the Herald’s abandoned seat.  
  
“Do your worst,” he challenged. Across from him Dorian smirked as he reset the board. Cullen promised himself that any conversation that took place would either be related to the game or to the Inquisition. He wasn’t here to make friends with the mage. Just a take a very brief break from the incessant work that he had. Besides this was far less inappropriate than all the times he encouraged the Herald to distract him from training the recruits. He dreaded and looked forward to those moments. She wanted to know everything about him, it seemed, and Cullen wasn’t prepared for that. He had styled himself as nothing more than the Commander of the Inquisition’s forces and yet she sought to know the man behind the title, the man he had buried for being a waste.   
  
“I hope you didn’t learn to play in the Circle as well,” Dorian commented as he made his opening move. Cullen took a moment to decide on his plan of attack before taking his turn. “She’s terrible,” the mage confided. Cullen glanced up.  
  
“I doubt that,” he responded. “I’ve seen very little that the Herald isn’t talented at.” Dorian moved and Cullen quickly after. He saw a flash of what he thought might be interest across the other man’s face. Maybe the Herald really was a poor chess player. If Dorian was already surprised by what Cullen was doing. 

“Oh please. She isn’t here. You don’t need to be such an ass kiss.” Cullen frowned at him. Dorian grinned and picked up one of his pieces. “Have you seen the way she does her hair, after all? I realize she was raised in what might be equated with a prison but really. I assume they had mirrors.” Cullen would have argued that he thought the Herald’s hair was fitting. It suited her face. It also occurred to him to argue that it wasn’t totally uncommon for people living in the Circle to overlook the notion of appearance passed whatever it meant to look appropriate, though that was more defensive than anything else. He didn’t say anything. One wasn’t a comment befitting a commander to a comrade in arms. The other was too much information about himself for this. Dorian continued when Cullen stayed silent, “I saw her slide down a steep incline on her butt the other day.”  
  
“I… On her butt? Why?”   
  
“The woman’s a mess.” Dorian seemed pleased to have gotten the reaction out of him. He returned the piece he had been holding to the board and moved a different one. Cullen stared down at the board. He opened his mouth and then promptly shut it. Dorian was cheating. He had placed the piece from his hand in a different position than it had been initially. He glanced up at the other man who was watching him with a self-satisfied grin on his face. The conversation was meant to distract him. He would see how the Herald might have fallen for something like this. Dorian was her friend, after all. Cullen smirked slightly and continued to play. He knew better than to let the mage distract him with idle banter. Dorian wasn’t his friend. In the end Cullen one the game.   
  
“Now wait just a minute,” the Tevinter said as he examined the board carefully. Cullen stood and gathered his things. Their eyes met for a moment and if Dorian could read that Cullen knew he was cheating the man made no sign of it. “I’ll expect a rematch, Commander, at the very least to keep me from dying of boredom in this frozen hellhole you call a country.”  
  
  
The chess games had continued after Haven into Skyhold. The banter over the games slowly changed from something meant to be a distraction to something with actual depth. Despite himself Cullen enjoyed the change. He had kept himself distant and professional and still Haven had been a slaughter. He had done everything right and there still hadn’t been anything that could be done. He had saved as many as he could. His growing closeness to Dorian would not endanger the Inquisition. Cullen could have, he deserved, at the very least one friend. It was not a word he had thought with any sort of warmth since before the Blight. It was not a word he had anticipated thinking about the mage when he first saw him. The Maker worked in mysterious ways.   
  
“I wish you had mentioned something to me,” he said. Dorian looked up from the book that he was really only pretending to read with an exasperated look. Cullen crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at him. With a sigh Dorian snapped the book shut.  
  
“What would I have said? Oh, Commander, save me from the meanness of the ill thought out and worse timed insults from your backwater soldiers.” Cullen frowned at the flippancy that he supposed he should have expected when he mounted the stairs to the library to locate Dorian. Sometimes Dorian reminded him of Hawke and the way that severity seemed lost on her, the way her mouth always got the better of her logic, the way he had seen her smile and joke to hide the hurts that built and balanced on her shoulders.   
  
“What about: Cullen, some of your men are being pricks? That would have worked just as well.” He shook his head. “I would have put a stop to it straight away. You know that.” 

“If I let every cruel word about blood magic and slavery and what have you make me cry I’d be nothing more than a blubbering mess most of the time.” He waved a hand absently in the air, but Cullen thought he saw beneath the gesture the kernel of hurt that lived within him. “I’m a big boy, Commander, I can handle hearing people whisper behind my back.” Cullen leaned against the corner of the nearest bookcase.   
  
“What about to your face?” It made him angry to think that he hadn’t noticed, that Dorian might not have trusted him to do something about it and thus stayed silent. It had been Cassandra that had overheard the soldier spitting vitriol at Dorian about his homeland. She had come to him immediately with the information. Dorian might have been able to ignore it, might have felt it was easier just to shrug it off but Cullen did not believe that was for the best. He was one of the Inquisitor’s trusted inner circle. He had more than proven himself as being cut from a different sort of cloth than the Tevinter cultists they were fighting. He deserved respect and courtesy especially from the men and women in the Inquisition army.   
  
“Commander, please—“ Cullen shrugged and pushed himself away from the bookcase.  
  
“If it happens again I hope you’ll tell me, Dorian. I don’t tolerate hate speak in my ranks.” He paused for a moment, uncertain, before continuing. “And I certainly don’t tolerate people speaking of my friends in such a way.”  
  
“Thank you,” the other man said lowly. Cullen reached down and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder before excusing himself. He still had a punishment to oversee.   



End file.
